If you weren’t there in the late ’90’s between the rock of Unisys suing people for creating GIFs without a license, and the hard place of MSIE’s then terrible support for PNGs, you probably won’t care. But GIFs are no longer encumbered by patents.

When I was facing this problem, my employer was bought by a huge corporation. Hey, maybe they had a GIF license, and all my troubles would be over! I managed to get the question posed to the legal department of the corporation had a license that allowed us to generate GIFs.

Being the top-notch legal minds of a high-tech corporation, they came back with this answer:

“Well, it depends on the content of the images.”